Une approche multi-agents pour la composition de services Web fondée sur la confiance et les réseaux sociaux

This thesis deals with service discovery, selection and composition problems. The aim is to fulfill a complex requester query. To do that, we propose a multi-agent approach based on trust and social networks. We define a trust model as a compositional concept that includes social, expert, recommender and cooperation-based component. The social-based component judges whether or not the provider is worthwhile pursuing before using his services. The expert-based component estimates whether or not the service behaves well and as expected. The recommender-based component checks whether or not an agent is reliable and if we can rely on its recommendations. The cooperation-based component allows agents to decide with whom to interact in a service composition. We propose a distributed algorithm for service discovery using trust between agents and referral systems in social networks. We also develop a new method based on a probabilistic model to infer trust between non adjacent agents while taking into account roles of intermediate agents. Finally, we present an original coalition formation process which is incremental, dynamic and overlapping for service composition in social networks. %In particular, our coalition formation process engaging self-interested agents is incremental, dynamic and overlapping. Experimental results show that our multi-agents approaches are efficient, outperforms existing similar ones and can deliver more trustworthy results at low cost of communications.Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons aux problèmes de découverte, de sélection et de composition de services. L'objectif est de satisfaire une requête complexe d'un demandeur de services. Pour ce faire, nous proposons une approche multi-agents fondée sur la confiance et les réseaux sociaux. Nous définissions un modèle de confiance en tant que concept compositionnel formé de quatre composantes: une composante sociale, une composante d'expertise, une composante de recommandation et une composante de coopération. La composante sociale juge s'il est intéressant de suivre un fournisseur avant d'utiliser ses services. La composante d'expertise estime si un service se comporte bien et comme prévu. La composante de recommandation vérifie si un agent est pertinent ou pas et si l'on peut compter sur ses recommandations. La composante de coopération permet aux agents de décider avec qui interagir dans une composition de services. Nous proposons un algorithme distribué pour la découverte de services utilisant la confiance entre les agents ainsi que les systèmes de références dans les réseaux sociaux. Nous développons également une nouvelle méthode s'appuyant sur un modèle probabiliste pour inférer la confiance entre les agents non adjacents tout en tenant compte des rôles des agents intermédiaires. Finalement, nous présentons un processus original de formation de coalitions qui est incrémental, dynamique et recouvrant pour une composition de services dans les réseaux sociaux. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que nos approches multi-agents sont efficaces, plus performants que les approches similaires existantes et peuvent offrir des résultats plus dignes de confiance à faible coût de communications

Exploratory study to explore the role of ICT in the process of knowledge management in an Indian business environment

In the 21st century and the emergence of a digital economy, knowledge and the knowledge base economy are rapidly growing. To effectively be able to understand the processes involved in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge management in the business environment is critical to the success of an organization. This study builds on the previous research of the authors on the enablers of knowledge management by identifying the relationship between the enablers of knowledge management and the role played by information communication technologies (ICT) and ICT infrastructure in a business setting. This paper provides the findings of a survey collected from the four major Indian cities (Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Villupuram) regarding their views and opinions about the enablers of knowledge management in business setting. A total of 80 organizations participated in the study with 100 participants in each city. The results show that ICT and ICT infrastructure can play a critical role in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge in an Indian business environment

The enablers and implementation model for mobile KMS in Australian healthcare

In this research project, the enablers in implementing mobile KMS in Australian regional healthcare will be investigated, and a validated framework and guidelines to assist healthcare in implementing mobile KMS will also be proposed with both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The outcomes for this study are expected to improve the understanding the enabling factors in implementing mobile KMS in Australian healthcare, as well as provide better guidelines for this process

Design issues for agent-based resource locator systems

While knowledge is viewed by many as an asset, it is often difficult to locate particularitems within a large electronic corpus. This paper presents an agent based framework for the location of resources to resolve a specific query, and considers the associated design issue. Aspects of the work presented complements current research into both expertise finders and recommender systems. The essential issues for the proposed design are scalability, together ith the ability to learn and adapt to changing resources. As knowledge is often implicit within electronic resources, and therefore difficult to locate, we have proposed the use of ontologies, to extract the semantics and infer meaning to obtain the results required. We explore the use of communities of practice, applying ontology-based networks, and e-mail message exchanges to aid the resource discovery process

A Formal Framework for Modeling Trust and Reputation in Collective Adaptive Systems

Trust and reputation models for distributed, collaborative systems have been studied and applied in several domains, in order to stimulate cooperation while preventing selfish and malicious behaviors. Nonetheless, such models have received less attention in the process of specifying and analyzing formally the functionalities of the systems mentioned above. The objective of this paper is to define a process algebraic framework for the modeling of systems that use (i) trust and reputation to govern the interactions among nodes, and (ii) communication models characterized by a high level of adaptiveness and flexibility. Hence, we propose a formalism for verifying, through model checking techniques, the robustness of these systems with respect to the typical attacks conducted against webs of trust.Comment: In Proceedings FORECAST 2016, arXiv:1607.0200

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications